Mark Isham
Vapour Drawings

I would like to point out to friends passionate about all musical genres (as long as we are talking about masterpieces) an album released by the brilliant Mark Isham, a keyboardist and trumpet player with a difficult classification, who operates in an undefined area between soft electronics, world music, David Sylvian-like atmospheres (of whom he is a friend and collaborator), film music, and jazz. His particular trumpet does not sound—just to be clear—like that of an Armstrong, but it is closer to the reverberated sound of Miles Davis, the mutant sound of Jon Hassell, and the dreamy sound of Paul McCandless... a kind of "Brian Eno meets Pat Metheny," a sound full of keyboards (very far from new age), Lynn drums, fretless bass, and Steps Ahead-like inflections. Author of dozens of splendid soundtracks and a valuable collaborator of Van Morrison in the 1980s, he debuted on his own in 1983 with a marvelous album, balanced between ambient music, smooth jazz, and electronic, tinged with world and contemporary music and above all endowed with great feeling and interiority.

The programmatic "Many Chinas" opens the dance, showcasing the great sense of rhythm and syncopation, the remarkable use of mutated and fascinating sounds, and the overall fullness of sound that Mark Isham is capable of when he does not retreat into a more subdued world. The soft and enveloping electronics of "Sympathy and Acknowledgement" then gives way to one of the masterpieces of the album, an incredible track that I would undoubtedly choose among the ten of the proverbial desert island... "On the Threshold of Liberty" lives up to its title, an ideal soundtrack for a State being born, a Country freeing itself from oppression, the martial and exciting scan of the rhythm and that trumpet reverberating long and distant notes, seven pure minutes that would have moved, for example, in the cinematic masterpiece "Invictus." "When Things Dream," exactly what the title wants to announce (intimate and nocturnal), closes the first side of the original vinyl, and it is the sketches of "Raffles in Rio" and "Something Nice for My Dog" (which really seems to be a creation of Brian Eno from Another Green World) that open Side 2. We then listen to the intense "Men Before the Mirror," sound and composition à la Klaus Schulze, and then the pseudo-ethnic joke of "Mr. Moto's Penguin," to arrive at another intense masterpiece, trumpet, and piano truly meeting "In the Blue Distance," a dreamy and surreal track, unforgettable. Mark Isham will become moderately famous with the beautiful "The Grand Parade," which he will also perform on stage with David Sylvian, but he will continue to compose primarily film music and collaborate with other great artists from Windham Hill, for which he records, and ECM, where he could easily settle because Manfred Eicher's sound and philosophy would be truly congenial to him.

Excellent recording, minimal cover, a beautiful album (but not very well known nor distributed) to diversify one’s listening, perhaps compressed in the mainstream or clinging to the classics.